Is gambling an addiction or a sinful habit? What about pornography? Overeating? Drinking? Shopping? Checking email? Texting? Watching television? Playing video games? Working? They’ve all been called addictions. Is that really what they are?
If we follow this line of reasoning out to its logical conclusion, then it would be logical to call all bad or destructive behavior, “addictive,” so that “addicts” of whatever kind are helpless victims of forces beyond their control. A woman gambles because she cannot help it. A man drinks because he cannot help it. A woman shops because she cannot help it. A man throws himself into internet pornography because he cannot help it. Addicts, helpless victims, one and all.
The obvious problem with this view is that it entirely destroys morality by denying the possibility of good, freely-chosen action. We should call them what they really are: sinful habits. Or we could use the more exact and compact word, vices. A sign of the correctness of this word is that “vice” contains the notion of addiction—a kind of helpless slavery—even while it affirms the presence of free will and moral culpability.
To understand, we must take a very large step backward, actually back to the beginning, to what a human being really is. Human beings are creatures of body and soul. To be more exact, we are an essential union of body and soul. We are not mere bodies with no souls (as the materialists think), nor are we ghosts sitting in the steering room of body-machines (as the dualists think), nor are we solely souls for whom the body is a thought-projection (as the idealists think).
We are, to repeat, a real unity of body and soul. Consequently, what we do with either our body or our soul affects both our body and our soul. We become what we do; we are what we have done. Repeated sinful actions literally reform our body and soul according to the sin, so that the actions come to define our very nature by becoming second nature.
The development of this second nature is called a habit, and since it is destructive, a bad habit, or more compactly, a vice. As the vice becomes more engrained, we increasingly lose our freedom, our power, to act well. The vice then defines our entire being, both body and soul.
Thus, a woman who gambles becomes a gambler, a human being entirely defined by a particular kind of self destructive activity that has become her second nature. A man who views internet porn becomes a creature who can do nothing else, who thinks about nothing else, who is entirely defined by this self- and other-destructive activity, body and soul, mind and heart, eyes, fingers, and brain. What they originally chose to do, and what earlier on they could have much more easily chosen not to do, now becomes the master who ruthlessly in-habits them, changing every aspect of their intimate soul-body union.
That, for both the wise ancient pagans like Aristotle and the even wiser Christian moral tradition, was the real horror of vice or sin: it turned the potential glorious thing, a human being, into a deformed parody, a mockery, a pitiful creature enslaved in his own self-destructiveness, body and soul. To put it in St. Augustine’s concise terms, sin is its own punishment.
So, the scientists have gotten it half right. Since the effects on the body of such destructive actions are quite real, then we would expect them to be quite physical and measurable—and that is what scientists are picking up on, when they discover the measurable physical effects of gambling, pornography, and so on. But when they reduce the entire thing to the physical effects, and then treat the physical effects as the sole causes, then this half-truth becomes the wholly false view of the modern materialist-determinist who destroys morality by claiming that all our actions are merely mechanical reactions.
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